Earlier this week Tom Waits was named as an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Back in 1978, he sat down with Relix for the following interview, which ran in the May/June issue of the magazine…

Remember when you were knee-high to a fireplug and you’d be driving through the wino part of town with your dad at the wheel, and your mom would lock all the doors so that one of the rot-gut low-lifes wouldn’t stumble into your Pontiac with Thunderbird on his breath? If you saw Tom Waits weaving around the gutter, you’d probably mistake him for one of these same cirrhosis cases: moth-eaten wardrobe from Frederick’s of Goodwill, 3-day stubble, and a voice like a disposal chewing up tire chains.

But Waits is actually not the degenerate with fermented grapes coursing through his veins you might imagine. He’s an intelligent, witty lyricist who plays piano and guitar, and croaks out songs on five albums for the Asylum label, his newest being Foreign Affairs. He “sings” lovelorn laments, bawdy blues, and scatty, jazzy numbers like no one you’ve ever heard. Though he is already attracting more publicity than flies, he is sure to be a household name when Paradise Alley, the next movie by the #1 box office actor Sylvester Stallone, is released. Waits plays a pianist in a bar and sings three of his new songs. The movie is set New York’s Hell’s Kitchen circa 1940, and although it appears from his aging, scrawny frame that he could have been living then, Waits is only 28. He lives in Los Angeles’ sleazy Tropicana Motor Hotel where Andy Warhol’s Trash was partially filmed. The $9-a night flea bag was once a favorite of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (and we all know what happened to them ).

Waits has an affinity for the seamy side of the tracks, as evidenced by his recent stay at a join in San Francisco’s hairy Tenderloin district for this interview. When he arrived at road manager John Forchay’s room for the one hour session, he kicked open the door with a pointy, black shoe in true street-tough fashion. He lurched in, stuck up a lamp post pose against a wall, and then stepped on the balcony to banter with some kids smoking cigarettes below. “I saw you on t.v. on ‘Fernwood 2Night,’” said one of them, as Waits’ scruffy, whiskered face leaned over the railing. Later he expounded his gruff, trash compactor voice about recognition.

I’m never recognized when I need it most. It usually happens when I’m talking to some pretty girl in a bar. Some sophomore comes over and drools on my shoulder. So when I get lonesome I go to the baggage claim area at the airport. I saw Ravi Shankar there one night. He looked like Earl Scheib. I thought he’d be wearin’ that dumb sheet and sandals, but he had on a leisure suit.

“Now that you’re becoming popular are you going to move to Malibu near your friend Martin Mull?”

Nah. I can’t imagine him there…yeah, I can. Buncha assholes live out there, just like the assholes who love in Resting On My Laurels Canyon. I’m gonna stay where I am. Three pimps live next door and there’s some strippers, some Mexicans, and a guy named Sparky. This one guy who lives on my left side is a maniac, misfit unemployed actor named Richard Rust. He broke into my house while I was gone and stole my machete. He cleverly took the window off and came in and was sitting in the kitchen playing the piano about 3 in the morning. My friend Chuck E. Weiss was there and heard it and went OOOOOWWWWWEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOO (the scary sound Robert Klein makes). It was like The Beast With Five Fingers. Turned out to be Richard Rust high on some industrial strength shit. I’ve got some punks living behind me.

“Since your own music is revolting to some people, how do you feel about punk rock?”

I’d rather listen to some young kid in a leather jacket singing a song about, “I want to eat out my mother” than to hear some of these insipid guys, with their cowboy boots and embroidered shirts doing “Six Days on the Road.” It may be revolting to a lot of people but out of that will come some important events. I like Mink Deville. It’s a broad category, but at least it’s an alternative to the garbage that’s been around for ten years – like Crosby Steals the Cash. I’ve had it up to here with that; I need to hear another group that like that like I need another dick. I prefer an alternative to that, no matter how violent.

I was on the Bowery in New York and stood out in front of CBGBs one night. There were all these cats in small lapels and pointed shoes smokin’ Pall Malls and bullshitting with the winos. It was good. I was drinkin’ Wild Irish Rose. It’s not liquor and it doesn’t come from any produce, but it certainly alters your consciousness. The high lasts a couple hours and after that you go back to your hotel and throw up. You need a day off afterwards.

“Do you drink a lot to live up to your image?”

I Don’t drink when I’m working. John my road manager, does. He buys bargain stuff, like Frank’s Scotch, or Bensen & Hedges brewed in Rochester. He was my inspiration for my line, “I’ll meet you at the bottom of a bottle of bargain Scotch.” When I was on “Fernwood 2Night,” Martin Mull was the host and he apologized for having only a Diet Pepsi to offer me. I started drinking from a flask I had in my coat and he said something about me sitting there with a bottle in front of me. So I said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” Later I said, “People who can’t face drugs turn to reality.”

Martin is an old friend of mine. I used to be his opening act. He got his start as a labor organizer in a maternity ward.

“One of your best songs is ‘Bad Liver and a Broken Heart.’ Are women always dumping on you?”

No I’m just lookin’ for the right one. I’ve tried all kinds and nothin’ works. I may have to settle for livestock, like my first meaningful experience. Her parents didn’t like me so we broke up. She was a small heifer. I’m looking for a woman who owns a liquor store. There’s one maniac who sits on my porch every night – it’s like “Play Misty for Me.” No comic relief there at all; she’s a few bricks short of a full load.

I usually end up makin’ the scene with the magazine. I’ve got a subscription to Frederick’s of Hollywood’s catalogue. I cut out picture of underwear. I used to jack off to Vogue, but now it takes a little more. I occasionally read Hustler. They show photographs of the ovaries themselves.

“Not for long. Larry Flynt is turning it into a magazine with healthy sex,”

Yeah. Nuns with no underwear.

“Do you ever get groupies on the road?”

No. Sometimes a pedophile will come along. Usually you get, like, young English majors with skin problems. The band’s real upset about that. They wish I’d attract something more up their alley. Now Chip White, my drummer, gets more ass than a toilet seat.

“You wrote most of your lyrics about women on your first two albums, but now you seem to be branching out. True?”

I’m trying to get away from unrequited love and more into auto accidents and homicides. My road manager thinks I’m becoming the Sam Peckinpah of music. I’ve had a lot of experience on the road. I’ve eaten in truck stops and shopped at trucker’s supermarkets. I’ve hitch hiked but I hate it and won’t pick ‘em up. People look just like Charlie Manson and they’re on narcotics and probably have firearms and concealed weapons. I don’t trust ‘em. I’m not going to pick up a guy with devil eyebrows and “cunt” tattooed on his bicep. In L.A. in particular on the corner of Santa Monica and Western, it’s Charlie Starkweather and Charlie Whitman or some four-speed transvestite.

When I’m on the road, I usually sleep with my clothes on so I can go right out the door. I stayed at the same hotel in Phoenix with Blue Oyster Cult and Black Oak Arkansas. It was a real thrill for me, you know, being only two or three doors away from your heroes.

“Didn’t you once say that you liked the Cult about as much as listening to trains in a tunnel?”

I said that (smiling). No, I like ‘em. But then I also like boogers and snot and vomit on my clothes.

“You’re known as someone who normally is on the streets about the same time as the street sweepers. What hours do you keep?”

I keep them all – they’re all mine. I’ll eat at some late night place that serves food for external use only. I’m not talkin’ about your health food joint where you can get your bean sprouts and avocado sands. You get your identity crisis burgers floatin’ in patchouli oil served by some girl with a ring on her nose wearin’ a peasant shirt. Oh no. I’m talkin’ about a place where everything’s floatin’ in 30-weight. You wake up the next morning and your mouth tastes like the inside of a dead Apache’s loin cloth.

At this one place I elbowed up to the counter with the truck drivers and some cat telling me about his brother-in-law who lives in Amarillo who installs these little prophylactic machines in Phillips 66 stations. I walked out of there at 4 a.m. with enough gas in me to open up a mobile station.

“At one restaurant last year you got into a fight with the Law. You were accused of challenging some deputies to fight and using profanity, and you were quoted as saying, ‘I growled a little under my breath. It was somewhere between a harrumph and a Bronx cheer,’”

It was a little humbug with three plainclothes policemen. I stepped in to settle a dispute between two tables and got caught in the crossfire. From now on I’ll keep my nose out of other people’s affairs. It was real tacky; they grabbed us and threw us into phone booths and then the strings came up. (Waits breaks into the Jaws soundtrack) Juntada! Juntada! Juntada!

They put the cuffs on us and tossed us into the back of a green cab over a Datsun pickup. I thought we were takin’ that Last Ride. Chuck said, “It sure is quiet,” and I said, “It’s too quiet.” We were found guilty of disturbing the peace.

“You also got into trouble for singing your “Small Change” song when you said, ‘And the whores still smear on Revlon and they all look like Jayne Meadows,’ When you recorded it, you changed it to, ‘But the whores still hike up their skirts and search for drug store prophylactics.’"

I deleted the Jayne Meadows reference from the album ‘cause Steve Allen (her husand) would have been upset. You can use a personality’s name in a song but not if it’s slanderous. If you say that all the whores look like Jayne Meadows, regardless of whether they look like her or not you can’t say that…’cause the whores’ll get pissed off.

“On your newest album, Foreign Affairs, you do a duet with Bette Midler which is also on her album. How did that come about?”

Bette’s a friend of mine. She asked me to write her a song so I wrote “I Never Talk to Strangers.” She likes those old songs like, “Baby It’s Cold Outsdie,” so I decided to write something that sounds like a standard.

Bette and I played at the human rights rally last year at the Hollywood Bowl. She told me it’d be a good idea and that I’d go on right before her. It didn’t sound that bad but I was lucky to get out of there with my Johnson. The whole evening was a powder keg to begin with – playing for 25,000 militant homos. After Richard Pryor started, she gave him the finger and I was left holding the bag, if you will.

“I get the impression you’re very apolitical.”

I was raided a Methodist. What’s that mean? I read the papers but I don’t vote; I travel all the time.

“How did you stay out of the Draft?”

I just didn’t go. I was working. I went up for a physical and talked to the psychiatrist. I was 1-A for a long time and that’s the last I heard of it.

“Would you have made a good soldier?”

What do you think? I’d want to go straight to the top. I think I’d make a good drill sergeant.

“How did you avoid getting mixed up with the Peace, Love, and Dope scene in the 60s?”

I was kinda square, I guess. Every dog has his day. It used to be a lone cat could be content with a couple Blue Cheer albums and a bag of reefer and a couple blankets and some friends who wore boots. I think we’re in the midst of a national gender crisis. And then there’s a lotta cosmic debris, too. The public’s extremely gullible. If you pay $2,000 to have someone call you an asshole, you are an asshole. I’m not that expensive.

“Do you have any pets?”

I had a dog once, but he died, I barbecued him. We never had enough room for livestock. I used to have a couple stray cats. Tom cats. I’d go on the road and come back and they’d always be pissed at me. I wouldn’t give ‘em anything to eat; I’d give ‘em money, you know, and tell ‘em to eat out. If you don’t feed a cat for a year, they get reeeeeeeeal smaaaaaaaall.

I’m real concerned about personal hygiene and I don’t think it’s good to have animals in the house. The first cat I had I shaved bald and bought him a little sport coat and little hat and told him to go out and get a job if he wants to stay. His name was Get Off the Sofa.

“What was your youth like?”

My parents split up when I was young so I kinda took care of my mother and sisters. I started working when I was 14. I drove taxis, sold vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias, worked in gas stations and liquor stores, and had a paper route. I sold night crawlers to fisherman – you can buy live worms in the mail, you know. I dropped out of high school when I was 17. When I was about 19 I started songwriting and then a year later I was performing, and all self-taught. My parents support what I do. My mother was real pleased that I got a page in Time. My father thinks I’m a chip off the ol’ block. I think so too. Absolutely. He’s an old codger.

“Do you want to be an old man some day? It seems you’re following the James Dean ‘live fast, die young script.”

[Hacking and mumbling gibberish like a burn-out gaffer] I want to be an old man. I’ll look up skirts and stuff, but I don’t want to get the palsy or anything. I’d like to have some children. I’ll probably adopt a bunch of Mexicans and live out in Pico Ribera and watch a black and white TV set with a T-shirts on and a beer in one hand and dogshit on the lawn.